Well Here’s A Thing: Redigit Tells RPS There’s A Terraria 2

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Once upon a time, Andrew “Redigit” Spinks quit Terraria. He’d decided to move on to bigger and better things, mystery projects that beckoned to him from worlds far beyond Terraria’s treacherous loam. Fans were not happy. They scratched angry words into many an Internet, but their cries fell on deaf ears. For a little while. And then, kind of like Gandalf in that one movie (X-Men?), Redigit returned – with gifts, even! Update 1.2 is positively massive, and it’s finally out. But now Spinks is back where he started. Should he stay or should he go? He’s not entirely sure yet, but he was able to offer RPS one piece of enticing news. That mystery project? It’s Terraria 2.

Terraria 2’s actually been in various phases of planning for quite some time, but Spinks decided that his fans were right: he still had unfinished business with Terraria 1. It’s the double-edged sword of having a community whose passion borders on fanatical. Sometimes, you have to let them steer the ship.

In Terraria 2, I really want to have infinite worlds. You can travel anywhere.

“I actually planned, when I first quit Terraria, to have been halfway through my next project by now,” Spinks told RPS during a recent interview. “But it just didn’t happen. Instead, I decided to work on another update for Terraria to please the fans a little bit.”

Now, don’t take that the wrong way. Spinks was happy to give fans a penguin (and roughly a billion other things) for their thoughts, and he still is. But Terraria 1 has limits. Spinks laid the groundwork ages ago, after all – long before he’d amassed the massively malleable mountains of experience that come with releasing such a successful game. He thinks he can do better, and he can’t help but pine for the chance to dig deep and see what he finds.

“I’m super excited about starting Terraria 2,” he said, voice suddenly ringing with a pointed intensity. “It’s a ways out, but it’s gonna have a lot in common with the original. It’s gonna be quite different as well. I really want to expand on the whole Terraria universe.”

“There’s a lot of stuff I’m locked into with Terraria. The way loot works, the way character progression works. In Terraria 2, I really want to have infinite worlds so you’re not just stuck to one world. You can travel anywhere. I want more biome diversity in that, too. There’s a lot of stuff [I want to add and change].”

Knock it down, build it back up again. Terraria 1’s foundations are set in stone, but Terraria 2 is – at this point – a land of possibility. Where, though, does that leave the original Terraria? Is a finish line in sight? For real this time? Spinks is still deliberating, but ultimately, he’s keeping things in perspective. Either way, he’s got it pretty good, all things considered.

“I’d say this is probably gonna be the last seven-month update [to the original],” he chuckled. “But there’s a lot of stuff that I didn’t have the time to put into this one. For instance, there’s no final endgame boss. So I plan on, within the next month or two, finishing the endgame progression. I also have some ideas for a Halloween update I’d like to do too. I think people will get a kick out of that. So there might be a few more updates, maybe three or four months out.”

“It’s a tricky question, though. When do you stop working on one game and start working on something new? I honestly have no idea. Right now, I’m having a lot of fun with it. Everyone on my team is really enjoying working on Terraria 1. But I have looked into maybe hiring another small team to continue updates while I move onto Terraria 2. So that’s also an option.”

And that’s really what it comes down to: options. Among indie developers, Spinks is quite fortunate, and he’s well aware of that. He can pick his battles, he can hire teams, he can stuff a thousand items into an old game or begin work on something entirely new. It’s a privileged position born of prior success, and – regardless of what he does next – Spinks doesn’t plan on losing sight of that. What does that mean in the near-term? Well, probably no crowdfunding, for one.

“When I made Terraria, I did it in four months, and I think I only paid, like, not very much – and that was just for the sound,” he admitted. “So I’d like to be able to do something similar with Terraria 2. My personal preference is that I never be in a position where I need to get money to fund my projects.”

Madness! Lunacy! Both very underrated qualities, as it turns out.

Look for an interview with both Spinks and Edge of Space lead Jake Crane about crossovers, the state of the build/craft/fight/everything else genre, whether or not it’s becoming played out, potential design pitfalls, the state of their games, and more in the coming days.

That’s my biggest pet peeve with these sort of games. I’ve played terraria a lot already but the grinding never ceases to get boring. The only time mining for materials was fun was when I was getting hellstone. Pockets of lava and hellstone on the silt and ashes, collecting hellstone was more than just digging, it was almost like a puzzle.

I’ve not played Terraria specifically, but yes: block-digging stuff-building games could really benefit from some kind of progressive build-up of digging volume. The whole wood/stone/iron/diamond pick thing could do with some kind of complementary pick/huge drill/dirty great earth-chewing machinery progression.

(e.g. one of the things I want from Corneroids is, having built a ship using hand mining tools, was to then fit it with some kind of mining laser to step up to the next level of industrialization and build a bigger ship.)

This is one thing I liked about StarMade, you could upgrade your ship with mining lasers and eventually get to a point where you’d crack open a space station or a planet in a matter of seconds. Very satisfying, even with the minimal FX and complete lack of sound effects when I played it.

I’ve used dynamite for that purpose a bit but didn’t really like it. The stick of dynamite bounces around too much and then breaks so many blocks free that you have to collect it or the second explosion will push past the items_on_ground limit and stuff will disappear. It also makes big round cavities instead of neat tunnels.

So for all those reasons I prefer sticky bombs. They are much easier to place precisely and don’t make such a mess. It would be cool though if we could make shaped charges or something similar to use for fast mining/tunneling.

Well if the end goal is to mine faster, you’ve always been able to do that in all these games with the tiers of picks (wood, stone, iron, diamond), and even more so with enchanted picks (in Minecraft). You can mine very fast.

Mining wasn’t horribly time consuming, and at least gave you something to do.

A bigger issue to me was the progression itself, where each new resource made the previous resource irrelevant. You start mining copper, with dreams of making copper equipment. It starts slow, but you build your copper reserves, and you also find iron. By the time you have enough copper to make a full kit, you’ve found enough iron to start your dream of an iron kit. When working to collect iron for a kit, you find silver. By this point, copper is just garbage cluttering the screen and your inventory space, in some ways worth less than dirt. And iron is fast on its way to becoming worthless, because you will have a pointless excess of it probably before you forge your last piece of iron gear.

I think by silver I didn’t even bother forging complete sets, there just wasn’t any point. I was already working on gold by the time I had silver tools. (And by that point I’d collected countless amounts of copper and iron just by it being in the way of where I wanted to go.)

To be honest, I avoided crafting anything out of copper and iron as much as possible, to leave it in ore form for bricks. I would smelt just what I needed to progress, nothing more. But then again, I love building giant, useless houses and uselessly decorating them with ore materials. The only thing I didn’t like was that I couldn’t unbind the potion drink key, so I either had to move it to the numpad, or risk drinking all the potions I had just looted.

It is something best played with either other people, or while listening to podcasts or such.
Though once you get to drills in Terraria, mining normal blocks becomes incredibly easy, though by that point there are more than enough dangers to keep on your toes while looking for metals.
I think the game certainly picks up pace once you have a grappling hook and some mobility, as then you can swing around the place like loon, which is always fun.

The guy stopped working on a game so he could work on a free update that adds more content than some DLC I’ve paid for.

Anyway, this is perfect. I was expecting Starbound to be Terraria 2, but now there’s Terraria 2. So when I’m done with 1.2, maybe Starbound will be out, then when I’m done with it maybe Terraria 2 will be out… or not, actually maybe it’ll take longer. Still, you know, I can like, alternate, and stuff.

Right there with you lowprice. I thought Starbound was made by the same people and was essentially Terraria 2. Makes sense that the artist is making Starbound, as they look virtually the same.

Obviously, we will have to wait and see what Terraria 2 actually brings, but Starbound definitely looks like it will fill the niche and expand it nicely, so not sure if a true Terraria 2 will be necessary.

Not really. Starbound has the same graphics, being made by the same graphics designer as Terraria, and they’re in the same genre, but that’s about it. Comparing Starbound to Terraria 2 is like comparing GTA to Saints Row, or CoD to Battlefield. There’s just not enough similarities.

The thing that’s so great about these games for developers is that because they’re so dependent on content, releasing a a megapatch like 1.2 can result in a huge sales spike (Terraria is currently the #4 top selling game on Steam at $10). I hope the Starbound crew takes this approach and just continues developing the game for a year post-release. If they were so inclined, they could even release an expansion pack for $5 or so.

Redigit’s in a tight spot with Terraria 2 imo. While he was taking time off or working on updates, Tiy’s crew have been working heavily on Starbound, which is exactly what Terraria 2 should have been – massive, everything procedurally generated – weapons, planets, monsters (compare Starbound’s infinite monsters with Terraria’s ~30..), everything moddable.
So now Starbound is nearing completion, and it’s hard to imagine how Terraria 2 is gonna top it.

Maybe they don’t need to top it tho; maybe just making a game like Starbound or Terraria very extended will still be very profitable (this is my guess), so even if they get owned by Starbound… well, they still made money.

Starbound is very much going in the sci-fi direction. I’m sure there’d be space for a game more fantasy oriented, with a focus on spells and magic and such, which Terraria arguably does very well already.

1.2’s been big enough and cool enough (and not just ‘cos of the winter biome :P) that I really think they should’ve given it a name and made it *paid* (‘cos they deserve it) DLC. I’d’ve bought it for $5…

Lots of good points on here, and Terraria 2 is going to be hard pressed to find a niche among the games (and the devs making them) it has inspired. While the ‘multi-world’ idea is cool, it’s only impressive if we haven’t been anticipating Starbound for the same reason. There have been a few other Terraria-esque games out there that devs have done their own take on them and are worth looking into.

For those who don’t like the block-by-block mining that has been mentioned several peeps here, check out Asteria over at playasteria.com. The guys there have made lots of ‘quality of gameplay’ implements into their game. Everything ranged, no need to tab out and look up a wiki, progressive gear requirements (no more just digging EVERYTHING), and an in-game dungeon locator item to name a few of the features.

Terraria 1.2?? GREAT!!! Terraria 2?? Well, it’s going to take something new to get my interest.

I “LOVE” how when terraria came out alot of people thought it was a great game, but once star-bound was announced a large portion of the community started acting like terraria is a terrible game & star-bound is everything it should have been.

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